Postmortem Quotes

“The dead have never bothered me. It's the living that I fear.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“Survival my only hope. Success my only revenge”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“You artists think you’re the only ones who can relate to these things. Many of us have the same feelings, the same emptiness, the same loneliness. But we don’t have the tools to verbalize them. So we carry on, we struggle. Feelings are feelings. I think people’s feelings are pretty much the same all over the world.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“What the hell. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“But caffeine, cigarettes and cholesterol, the grim reapers of the common man - God forbid I should give them up.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“Isolation is the cruelest of punishments, and it had never occurred to me that I was something less than human because I wasn’t a man.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“I was consumed, too, not by the dying but by the dead.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“I disagreed. Some people feel things more deeply than others, and some people feel things the rest of us don’t. This is what causes isolation, the sense of being apart, different”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“The public is blaming the city officials, who in turn have to find someone else to blame. It's the nature of the beast. If the police, the politicians, can pass the buck on down the line, they will.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“When all else fails, I cook. Some”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“It was raining in Richmond on Friday, June 6.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“Crime reporting was aggressive in Richmond, an old Virginia city of 220,000, which last year was listed by the FBI as having the second-highest homicide rate per capita in the United States. It wasn’t uncommon for forensic pathologists from the British Commonwealth to spend a month at my office to learn more about gunshot wounds. It wasn’t uncommon for career cops like Pete Marino to leave the madness of New York or Chicago only to find Richmond was worse.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“People often say they don't dream, when it's more accurate to say that they don't remember their dreams. It gets under our skin, Kay. All of it does. We just manage to cage in most of the emotions so they don't devour us.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“Charisma is something you have or you don't have. You can't manufacture it. You can't. She didn't try. It just was. - Matt Pettersen”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“The dead have never bothered me. It is the living I fear.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“All this when I know human relationships are not founded on reason any more than my roses are fertilized with debate. I know seeking asylum behind the wall of intellect and rationality is a selfish retreating into self-protectiveness at the expense of another's well-being.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“I was a small insect faced with a formidable male network web in which I might be ensnared but never a part.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“I didn’t want her to be like me, robbed of innocence and idealism, baptized in the bloody waters of randomness and cruelty, the fabric of trust forever torn.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“We lie to children even though we didn’t believe the lies we were told when we were their age.”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“Her terror when she was attacked would have caused her digestion to completely shut down. It’s one of the body’s defense mechanisms. Digestion shuts down to keep blood flowing to the extremities instead of to the stomach, preparing the animal for fight or flight.”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“The dead have never bothered me. It is the living I fear.”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“There was a toilet and a lavatory,”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“All this when I know human relationships are not founded on reason any more than my roses are fertilized with debate. I know seeking asylum behind the wall of intellect and rationality is a selfish retreating into self-protectiveness at the expense of another’s well-being.”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“Isolation is the cruelest of punishments, and it had never occurred to me that I was something less than human because I wasn’t a man.”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“We lie to children even though we didn't believe the lies we were told when we were their age.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

“That’s deplorable,” I retorted, and I meant it. “How can she eat such a thing?” I began to chop. “Your grandmother would have let us starve first.”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“Dead bodies are a better deterrent than guard dogs. The dead have never bothered me. It is the living I fear.”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“She was all dressed up with rage with no place to go.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Post-Mortem

“Emptying my lab-coat pockets of the miscellaneous debris I had a habit of collecting during the day,”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem